


Red horses

by Itsprobablyme



Series: Soviet Cap [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Gen, Human Experimentation, Medical Torture, Soviet Au, Soviet Union
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-05
Updated: 2017-08-05
Packaged: 2018-12-11 13:29:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,845
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11715354
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Itsprobablyme/pseuds/Itsprobablyme
Summary: He didn’t want to be Boris Baranovski. To be Boris Baranovski meant to suffer endlessly. It meant you will be tormented until your person dissolves in pain. Until the shattered hand stops bleeding. Until the protruding bone becomes one with the metal. Until it doesn’t matter anymore, whether you shoot or are shot at, torture or are tortured, whether you rape or get raped.To be Boris Baranovski meant to remember the man on the bridge. Remember him a skinny large-headed youngster, who drew red horses and Red Guards in iconic style, remember him a grotesque angel in leather jacket, remember him a knight in black-and-green armour. Remember the fight on the bridge – and another fight on the bridge.Who the hell is Borka? Borka is dead.





	Red horses

**Author's Note:**

  * A translation of [Красный конь, золотая грива](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7940095) by [fandomRetellingsCrossovers2016](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fandomRetellingsCrossovers2016/pseuds/fandomRetellingsCrossovers2016). 



> Here is the second story from the "Soviet Cap" series. Names are Russianized, as usual:  
> James "Bucky" Barnes - Borka Baranovski  
> Steven Rogers - Stephan Rogov  
> "Borka" and "Styopka" are diminutives from "Boris" and "Stephan".

_But there is a worse grief, the grief that comes when a man has been tortured so long that he’s already “crazed”, that is – already out of his mind. They used to use term “crazed” to describe a man tortured on the rack. The man is being tortured. All around him is only the cold, hard wood of the rack; but the hands of the executioner or his assistant, though hard, are warm and human._

_And the man on the rack rubs his cheek against those warm hands which hold him to inflict the torture._

_This is my nightmare._

_Viktor Shklovski, “A Sentimental Journey : Memoirs, 1917-1922”_

  
1938

The door was half-opened, so Borka entered the room.

Stephan lay prone on the bed, dressed and with his shoes on, face hidden in a crease of his elbow. File was thrown on the floor, sketches scattered.

Borka bowed to pick them up. Couldn’t help going over them again. Such a beauty, he thought with a teeth grate. And the committee rejected them, obviously. A neat freak, like Rogov, couldn’t hit the bed right with his shoes on, unless he was extremely upset.

“’Tis retrograde,” Stephan said without moving. “Sacredotalism.”

In the picture, red horses, carrying a tachanka, sprawled in the air. They bowed their dragonlike necks, their thin legs treaded the sky, manes flew on the wind. The teamster, springily bent and airy, drew reins, and the trench coat spread behind his back with broken folds.  
“It’s Thor on his chariot,” smiled Borka. “How can Thor be sacerdotal?”

“They know better,” Stephan turned on his back. “Sacredotalism, that’s what they say.”  
On the next picture, front-page-to-be, Pavka Korchagin looked at the reader with blind eyes of Prophet Jeremiah, squeezing a pencil in his hand.   
Well, that could be considered as a sacredotalism, full stop.

“You keep poking the bear,” said Borka. “Why this iconic style?”

“It’s not iconic, it’s ancient Russian! It’s not my fault we picked this style from Byzantium, along with icons.”

“Well, ancient Russian or not, it is certainly not proletarian art.”

“Since when? Every art belongs to people, it was made by people, do they really think Rublyov or Ushakov were some aristocrats?”

“They were monks, for sure.”

Another picture: Pavka parts with Tonya. Oh, holy cow…

“Look me into eye and say it has nothing to do with El Greco’s _Noli me tangere_ ”.

“What? No way!” Stephan almost jumped on the bed, sitting up. Borka gave him a drawing, Stephan looked closely, raking his hair with his palm.

“Oh, hell… Believe me, Borka, it never occurred to me, like, never ever!”

Borka believed him. Stephan always was a poorest of liars. But…

“It was you who washed my brain with El Greco and his composition,” he said.

“I was… too much impressed with him, maybe.”

“So was the commission. Could you take your shoes off?”

“Commission,” Stephan kicked out one of rather large shoes and flung it against the wall, “wouldn’t recognize _Noli Me Tangere_ , come Jesus himself and whack them with a shovel!”

Suddenly he came to his senses.

“Is your old man home?”

“Uh-huh,” Borka frowned. Father should have been resting after the night shift. Stephan took off the other shoe and carefully put it near the door, then picked up the first and put it together with the second. The heel showed through the thread-bare left sock.

“Have you eaten something?” Borka asked.

“Yeah… Nope. Don’t remember, to be honest.” He snatched the picture from Borka’s fingers, stuffed it into the file and stuck the file into the neat stock under the bed. Borka sighed. Since Rogov buried his mother, there was no one to remind him to eat and sleep. He would fall asleep eventually, but to eat he could forget until hungry cramps started. Especially when he was consumed by work.

“Come, we have chickpea soup.”

"Don't worry, I have some boiled potatoes…”

“Potatoes for supper, let’s have dinner.

Door opened. Michail Yakovlevich, his face dolefully distorted, showed up in the aperture.

“Young man!” he said to Stephan, “Will you already bang a second not-so-proverbial boot against the wall, I would like to know?”

“Oh,” Stephan blushed. “I am sorry, Michail Yakovlevich, I will never again…”

“Not till next time,” Borka interjected.

“So what, I shouldn’t sleep anymore? Do you have any conscience anywhere on you, blockheads? Come on, Styopa, bang it against the wall, I want to bring it to a close.”

Stephan, frowning guiltily, flung the second boot. Not particularly hard, but it satisfied Baranovski-senior enough to resume his sleeping.

“What a pig I am,” said Styopka. He looked estranged, even abandoned, and when he sat this way, with his big head hung down, no one could say he’s older than fifteen.

“They just got under your skin,” Borka consoled him. “Let’s go have dinner.”

“I cannot eat you off.” 

“Eat us off? C’mon! You always junket us when you have money.”

“And when was the last time I had them?” Stephan raised his head and smirked.

Since Aunt Zhenya’s death he tried to moonlight somehow, bun never stuck anywhere. He wasn’t lazy or skiving his work off, he just fell ill one day or another. And speaking of his paintings…

If it was for Boris Baranovski to decide, he would cover the entire Leningrad with Stephan’s works. Because looking at them made you hear the high and clear trumpet’s song and hoofs clattering, and this made you eager to sing, to live and work for the Revolution, or to die for it.

But the people in those committees were driven by their own logic. And Borka understood that logic very well. He could explain to Stephan in lay terms, why those people need no Pavka Korchagin of Stephan’s. They need no such people as Pavka at all, they would gladly bury him again could he rise from the dead, they bury him every day, that’s why they needn’t any pictures that make people’s hearts beat. They feel a revolutionary in Stephan, and a good revolutionary nowadays is a dead one.

He could explain, but Stephan understood it as well. So they just sat silently opposite one another, as they used to. At last Borka said:

“You want me to teach you boxing but don’t eat. How can I set you a proper punch if you weight nothing?”

Stephan laughed.

“Alright, let’s go.”

 

1943  
…Levko, Yan and Zachar died, but Borka couldn’t. Running with sweat, cold and hot, tearing his throat with cries, shitting something black and acrid, he remained alive. They swilled him with cold water to reduce fever and wash away the body liquids. He was shivering violently, and the iron frame, to which he was fastened with leather straps, was rattling like a train on the rails’ joints. A train sped him through the flaming tunnel, and sergeant Baranovski sweltered in fumes.

A dwarfish man came from time to time, stuck a needle into his hand, took a blood sample and went off. Sergeant Baranovski concentrated his hatred on that man. That manling never said a word and wore civies, but everyone obeyed him absolutely. That’s how Baranovski understood that the manling is a reason and source of all the atrocities in Block 9, which Stalag prisoners called “The Knackery”.

Prisoners were shot at the attempted flights or at any move that could be interpreted as one. They were beaten to death on the quad for an unbuttoned shirt or fainting at the call. They perished in workshops because of weakness or negligence. The commandant could kill a prisoner to test a new rifle which left only a soot spot where a man stood, or he could kill prisoner in a drunken mood. But the scariest was to get into the Knackery, run by the little man in round spectacles – doctor Arnim Zola.

Longtimers told that first they lured people to the Knackery with promise of lighter work and extended ration. But soon they became short of volunteers, so they started to take people by force. They took weakened, ill, disobedient ones, Gypsies, Jews, communists. If they couldn’t find ones, the commandant just walked along the line and poked with his stick: you, you, you… They never came back. The fourth workshop workers told that they heard cries through the air vents.

No one could say more: the entire personnel of Block 9, even the cleaners, were militaries.

Sergeant Baranovski was the only idiot among newbies that got here voluntary.

His bunk-mate Kazimir, the Lithuanian, prayed to God for his three children so fervently, he begged to deliver him so desperately, he cried so bitterly when Commandant’s stick lowered on his shoulder, that Baranovski couldn’t stand that. He stepped forth, elbowing his way through the line: take me. Ich bin Jude.

Or, maybe he pitied Kazimir not so much as he understood that sooner or later all of them will end up at the Knackery. Nazis produced weapons here, those lightning rifles, and they were not going to let workers live: all mouths would be covered with earth. So what was the reason to linger day by day, forging weapons against your own comrades? Kazimir had children. Borka had nobody. Stephan had written the last autumn that Borka’s folks were killed in bombing. Then he stopped writing: the blockade. Some guys from Leningrad, that served together with Borka, received letters from their kins that had evacuated. The censure gutted the letters, but something could be read between lines: in winter Leningrad was starving mortally. While fat one gets thin, thin one gets dead. Styopka could hardly survive. So why Borka should live in slavery? Why should he live in fear of capo’s truncheon, guard’s bullet, well-fed dog? To hell with that!    

Of course he regretted his choice when poison in his veins started killing him. If he knew what an inhuman torment awaits, he would back off. Kazimir had children, he prolonged himself to the future, extended his kin, how stupid it was to volunteer for him! It was worse than burning alive: you couldn’t inhale the flame and be done with it. Baranovski felt the flame rushing through his veins, he convulsed in his shackles and could do nothing to die.  
When Borka survived after all, the bespectacled manling unlocked his lips. Sehr gut, mein Junge, sehr gut. Wir gehen in die zweite Phase…

They injected him with something under skin of the right leg and intravenously in the left arm. The arm swelled up to the shoulder, skin cracked. The leg abscessed as hell, and then went septic. Manling’s henchmen noted every detail. Baranovski felt worse and worse, he lost consciousness and raved deliriously, but when he came to his senses, the swell ceased and the abscess opened, and when pus ran out, the wound healed in a day.

The bespectacled manling was satisfied. Baranovski found a purpose: killing him. One day they will think him too sick and weak, one day this rat in spectacles comes closer – and then Baranovski will take his chance to bite off manling’s throat.

They covered his hands and chest with cuts, then rubbed earth into wounds. All went like the first time: inflammation, festering, fever, and then – burst and healing. No scars left. The rat bastard looked as if it was his birthday.

The other time they gave him water infected, maybe, with cholera germs. He almost shat out his guts, but in a day was healed without any medicines. The next time it was the glandular plague. Bubos, weeping limph, appeared everywhere. After that both he and the camera were drowned in carbolic. That was when he attempted to kill the rat-man, and only gave the manling another surveillance matter: how long it takes for him to recover from the flesh-tearing whipping.

As soon as they knew he heals like a dog, they made no bones about beating him. They did it tentatively, just before the next experiment. He never knew what they injected him with, thrashed too badly to notice the symptoms.

After that, experiments were over and the bespectacled man stopped coming. Medics just took his blood, in liters.

Baranovski was good at biology in his school times. The serum. They did something to him that made him immune to the worst diseases. And now they used his blood to cook up some medicine or vaccine for the Nazi soldiers.  

So much for fucking the fate over…  
They fed him to his heart’s content and gave even meat and chocolate, but he never could get enough strength, they took his blood too often, and they beat him up before, efficiently and thoroughly, regularly like a clock, exactly at eight p. m. on odd-numbered days.    
And when Baranovski almost gave up all hope to see the manling, he suddenly appeared. He look disturbed, even frightened, disheveled, sweated buckets. «Nehmt alles!» he ordered to medics and rolled over.

Baranovski dashed against his bonds. Leather straps crunched. Medic hit him into the midriff, then beat on the face until his eyes dimmed. Nazis were panicked with something. They took a liter of blood, then attached the next bottle and the next. So, that’s it, he thought. Farewell ye dungeons dark and strong, the wretch's destinie…

“Borka, wake up! Are you alive?”

He managed somehow to open a swollen eye.

Fucking God-botherers were not lying: the heaven existed. For the reason unknown it looked like the same manipulation room of the Block 9, but Baranovski already knew: one cannot expect too much from life, let alone afterlife. Of course it could be the hell or a bathhouse with spiders, but hardly any devil looks like Styopka Rogov.

All the more so with spiders.

There was something wrong with Rogov, but Borka was too weak to think. Only when Rogov unfastened him and lifted like a bride, with no effort, he realized…

“How did you get here?”

“Long story”, Rogov kicked open the nearest door. Only dead bodies, fastened to frames, were there.

“What are you looking for?”

“Clothes for you. Boots. We get outta here, you couldn’t go far in this robe.

…He realized it was a near-death delirium. His thoughts steadied. Now he understood how Styopka grew himself a door-wide shoulders: in heaven they gave him a body of his true size.

He smelt sharp and somehow familiar, like apple vinegar.

“Stop bride-carry me, I can walk.”

Reeling, Boris showed Stephan to the rat-manling’s office. Of course the bastard ran off. But he took only documents and left schnapps and chocolate.

Stephan left for a while, and then returned with turnkey’s warm jacket and boots. Such a good delirium! Borka put himself in the jacket and boots, shared chocolate bars around the pockets.

“Why do you smell with vinegar?”

Stephan pulled at his collar, sniffed, and made a face.

“Hell, it’s good you’ve noticed. If you haven’t we’d end up in a nice pickle.”

“Why?”

Stephan opened the schnapps bottle and pulled really hard. It beat the band, even for the near-death delirium. Not only Styopka topped him by half of a head now, not only he was broad as barrel, he drank schnapps like water!

“What a pig-swill!” – having half emptied the bottle, Stephan pressed his hand at his mouth, obviously fighting nausea.

“You’ll get wired.”

“Nah,” Stephan pulled at the bottle again. “It’s but quick calories for me. When I smell vinegar it means I’m about to croak.”

Borka gave him a chocolate. Stephan unceremoniously bit a half, almost with a paper, the rest he gave back to Borka, downed the half-full bottle in his breeched pocket and gave Borka a shoulder.

“Let’s get out.”

He held Borka with his right hand and in the left he carried a kite shield, just like the ones he drew himself for the “Lay of Igor's Warfare”. Borka was not very scrupulous about the dream. Angels can wear whatever they want. It’s enough he’s here, enough he’s dragging Borka through the Fourth workshop.

The workshop was empty, though there was a firefight outside. There had been a firefight here, too, a while ago: they stumbled upon the body of a guard. Some machines ran idle. Charging blocks for rifles were scattered everywhere.  

“What’s this?” Stephan picked one of them.

“Something like cartridge. There is some fuckery in the Sixth, it charges them with energy. Don’t know how, we prisoners are not allowed there.”

Stephan pocketed the block.

“Where is the Sixth?”

“Come, I’ll show you.”

“No, you get to the exit, the guys will wait for you.”

“Fat chance,” Borka just knew if he let Stephan go, the dream will be over and he dies instantly. “Follow me.”

There, in the underground facility, they finally met. A tall SS-man and the bespectacled midget were waiting for the lift. Borka and Stephan were divided from them by the narrow sliding bridge, and all Borka needed to get to the rat’s throat was to cross the bridge.   
Stephan grabbed him forcefully by the shoulder and moved behind, stepped forth, shielded.

An SS-man yanked at his energy pistol and shot. Four charges. The shield, painted red, with a golden star at the center, made a perfect target.  
Stephan should be torn to shreds, but the shield took the damage. It only squeaked when blue lightings made holes in it. One of them passed through the shield and hit Stephan in the chest. He gave a shout but remained alive and standing.

SS-man holstered his gun and did a thing Borka never expected even delirious: he torn his face off.

“Aw heck!” said Stephan. Borka suddenly laughed: even self-flaying SS-man could not wrench a proper cussing from Styopka. He’s angel now, they are not allowed to cuss…

“Captain Union,” SS-man stepped on the bridge, grinning with his raw-meat face. “I am a big admirer of your films.”

What is he drivelling about, Borka wondered. What has Styopka to do with that propaganda films of the “Red Bogatyr”?

“How’s Dr. Erkind?” SS-man’s Russian was remarkably good and fluent. “Had he really took his own life? Had his Jewish spirit failed the mission his great mind obliged him with? Or Bolsheviks killed the goose that laid the golden eggs, as they used to do?

Stephan, grinning in berserk rage, rushed at the SS-man. They traded heroic blows that made the metal bridge rock wildly. Once the SS-man hammered a dent in Stephan’s shield, the other time Stephan sent him flying – they had their fun until the frightened ratling pulled at the turning machinery lever and the bridge they fought upon went apart. Everything started to explode, SS-man and ratling fled on the lift, and Stephan with Borka had a rough time getting out.

Afterwards, when they walked through the forest (Borka finally convinced himself that it’s not a delirious dream), he asked:

“Why didn’t you shoot them?”

“Was short of ammo”.

He reached into his lightning-perforated jacket and extracted some burnt metal device. Looked it over, sucked his teeth and tossed the thing into bushes.

“Radiobeam, for bombers. I was supposed to settle it there.”

“Looks like Jerries left our falcons nothing to bomb.”

Almost four hundred men escaped the Stalag that day, having captured two tanks and a lorry.

Slightly more than hundred and a half made it to the Soviets. Not all died, many Ukrainians and Poles just ran off.

Kazimir didn’t run, though he could, he was a driver.

Baranovski didn’t even know where to write to his wife and kids.

 

2016  
…He choose Romania for the old time’s sake. Many has vanished rom the memory, but the poor skills of Romanian secret service stuck.

He imposed an Ukrainian migrant worker, with a passport he had stolen from one of them in Poland. He attached himself to the construction gang. It turned out to be convenient, everyone wore gloves. He looked strange anyway: he didn’t shower with others and his spoken Ukrainian was poor. Well the last part wasn’t a phase: many of Eastern Ukrainians, the war refugees, were native Russian speakers.

When the gang returned home, he hired a flat in Bucharest. Worked at the local marked, unloaded trucks. Learned how to live amongst people, sometimes using scenarios stuck in memory, sometimes just mimicking others' behavior.

He dreamt of a manling in the round glasses. Manling tilted above him with a syringe. Also treffen wir uns wieder, Sergeant Baranowski… Left hand pierced with pain. How metal can hurt? Oh, if anyone knows, it’s this barnacled. Legt ihn auf Eis…

He didn’t want to be Boris Baranovski. To be Boris Baranovski meant to suffer endlessly. It meant you will be tormented until your person dissolves in pain. Until the shattered hand stops bleeding. Until the protruding bone becomes one with the metal. Until it doesn’t matter anymore, whether you shoot or are shot at, torture or are tortured, whether you rape or get raped.

To be Boris Baranovski meant to remember the man on the bridge. Remember him a skinny large-headed youngster, who drew red horses and Red Guards in iconic style, remember him a grotesque angel in leather jacket, remember him a knight in black-and-green armour. Remember the fight on the bridge – and another fight on the bridge.

Who the hell is Borka? Borka is dead. He fell from the bridge, he was thrashed against the rocks and frozen near death in an icy river. And you never came. Another came, that barnacled with his syringe and brainwashing machine.

He clearly remembered whom he was beating then. Whom he was killing.

The one who never came for him.

That one, in his “bogatyr” helmet, in his black-and-green combat suit, with a red star on his chest.

But that one was very hard to kill. He survived two knife stabs and three bullets, and he came to help the Winter Soldier when Soldier was pinned down by the container.

Why didn’t he come before?

Later it became known from the museum leaflet: the angel had a reasonable excuse, he also was dead. Well, mostly dead, he’s an angel after all.

There was a temptation to come to the angel for the answers. But some emotion, long forgotten, said: you shot him, you stabbed him, you beat him into pulp. One does not simply make a visit after such deeds.

And there was more. To come to him meant to become Borka Baranovski for him. Unbearable.

He smelled a rat while crossing the street. A newsdealer watched him intently, and then vanished from his stand.

He took a newspaper. Saw himself on the first page. An explosion in Vienna.

He wasn’t in Vienna. And he experienced no memory losses last days. He was here, he worked, bought things…

Well, it’s time to run again. It’s not that bad, it’s like always. Just take the escape backpack in the apartment…

…In the backstreet, someone drew the red horse with the golden mane. With a very sure hand, in a very peculiar manner.

Borka swallowed. He felt like running away, abandoning everything.

He knew who will meet him up there.

**Author's Note:**

> The novel Stephan illustrated was "How the steel was tempered" by Nikolai Ostrovskiy, the disabled Civil War vet. Pavka Korchagin is a protagonist of this novel, Tonya is his love interest, whom he parted with, beause she was "too bourgeois".  
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_the_Steel_Was_Tempered
> 
> It's implied that Rogov and the Baranovskis live in a communal apartment.  
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communal_apartment
> 
> "Lay of Igor's Warfare" also known as "The Tale of Igor's Campaign" is an ancient Russian poem.  
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tale_of_Igor%27s_Campaign 
> 
> That's how I imagine Stephan's artistic manner:  
> http://www.vsluh.ru/uploads/base_image/image/32839/huge_1701deba-8571-4126-96a3-52bb4750faf5.jpg


End file.
